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Are $150K - $250K Detached Homes Available in the City of Harrisonburg?

Ignore the graph above for a moment -- and let's see what we find....

There are only 15 detached homes currently on the market in the City of Harrisonburg priced between $150K and $250K.

Wow! At first blush, this is (or seems to be) very significant. One might conclude that we are seeing a significant under supply of these "mid-priced" homes in the City of Harrisonburg, and assume that this under supply is causing very few of these homes to actually sell.

But wait -- looking further (now you may refer to the graph above, thank you for your patience) it seems that plenty of these homes are actually selling. In fact, 130 detached homes between $150K and $250K sold in the City of Harrisonburg last year.

The tricky part is this -- if 130 buyers are buying per year, that's an average of 10.83 buyers per month. And thus, if there are only 15 such homes on the market, that is a 1.4 month (42 day) supply of homes for sale. Which is -- rather absurdly low. Most folks consider a six month supply to provide a balanced market between buyers and sellers.

So -- yes, homes are SELLING between $150K and $250K -- but they aren't widely AVAILABLE at any given point. When they come on the market, they sell quickly!

A few other observations....

When including both attached and detached homes, there has been a steady uptick in $150K - $250K sales over the past five years -- with over 200 sales last year.

Much of the increase in home sales between 2015 and 2016 was in detached homes.

While there are currently only 15 detached homes for sale in this price range, there are 36 homes for sale in the price range if we include attached homes as well.

These $150K - $250K detached home sales might slow this year -- perhaps as a result of these low inventories. There have only been 78 such sales thus far in 2017, whereas there were 97 during the same timeframe last year.